Nine Ways of Seeing a Body

Sandra Reeve

Description

Nine different approaches to the human body as seen in movement, performance and psychotherapy.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychotherapy

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908009500
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2011 by: Triarchy Press Axminster United Kingdom
[phone] [e-mail] www.triarchypress.net
© Sandra Reeve, 2011.
The right of Sandra Reeve to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Artwork on cover by Greta Berlin. www.gretaberlin.co.uk
ISBN:978-1-908009-50-0
C ONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Lens 1: The Body as Object
Lens 2: The Body as Subject
Lens 3: The Phenomenological Body
Lens 4: The Somatic Body
Lens 5: The Contextual Body
Lens 6: The Interdependent Body
Lens 7: The Environmental Body
Lens 8: The Cultural Body
Lens 9: The Ecological Body
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
About the Publisher
P REFACE
Fifteen years ago, during movement practice at the Padepokan Lemah Putih, when I was living in Java, I had the insight that when I used the word ‘body’, I was talking about something different from a Javanese colleague who used the same word.
I was astonished. At that time it was already clear to me that notions of self were culturally specific and that each person’s experience of self was unique; but the body seemed so ‘there’, so biological, anatomical, physiological, indisputable… In that moment of practice, I understood that how we view our bodies, the way we inhabit our bodies and our experience of ‘body’ are equally varied.
More recently, as part of my practice as research PhD, I decided to begin to investigate different views of the body to contextualise my own work and to see how those views might have influenced my current position as a movement teacher, artist and psychotherapist engaged in movement, performance, embodiment and ecology. I was constantly working with bodies.
The nine lenses that follow are the result of that investigation and are intended to be useful as a stimulus for teachers and students of dance, performance, movement, somatics and the arts therapies. Perhaps they will also serve as an interdisciplinary resource for other areas of study, where a brief review of approaches to the body could be useful.
This is by no means an exhaustive study and I admit in advance to my own bias towards the somatic and ecological lenses, as these correspond with my own work and with my respect for Buddhist mindfulness practice. However, the research into overlapping aspects of the other lenses has helped me to define my own position and viewpoint along the way.
Perhaps to stave off possible objections from people whose preferred lenses have not been included here, the publishers have invited me to edit a second collection of body lenses to add to this one – as long as they follow the basic format. With that in mind, please feel free to send me your ideas, suggestions or writings.
Sandra Reeve – June 2011
[e-mail]
I NTRODUCTION
The human body is thought about in many different ways and viewed through many different lenses. That might seem a statement of the obvious, but it is intended to offset our enduring habit of forgetting that we ever saw the world differently from the way we see it right now (whether that is ‘we’ as individuals, as a tribe or as a species).
Recently, it has broadly been ‘situated’ in eight main ways, which I describe in the pages that follow. Each lens has both been a product of its time and culture and has contributed to shaping the worldview of those who looked through it. Then I propose a ninth that, I think, both reflects our current preoccupations and might help us to address the concerns of our 21st Century world.
The eight ways or lenses are:
• the body as object
• the body as subject
• the phenomenological body
• the somatic body
• the contextual body
• the interdependent body
• the environmental body
• the cultural body
It’s important to note from the outset that these lenses co-exist today: they often overlap and are not mutually exclusive. I also want to stress that this is a practitioner’s account and not a purely academic explanation. The way that we experience our bodies, and how we articulate that experience, is of academic interest but I believe that it has also shaped – and continues to shape – our whole relationship to one another and to the world we inhabit.. That is to say, the way we in the West look at our bodies – and the sense of dislocation from our bodies that we have tended to experience – help to explain the equally dislocated worldview that has led to our current ecological crisis. Equally, in my opinion, changing the way we view our bodies can help to change the way we view the world around us and the ecosystems of which we form a part. To support those two claims, I make a twin assumption:
1. I believe that how we move shapes (and even creates) our attitudes – and reveals those attitudes to the world – to the same extent as the spoken word does.
2. I also believe that we can change our attitudes by changing our movement, provided we are aware of the dynamic interaction of our movement and the surrounding environment.
The ninth lens, which I shall explain towards the end of the book, is my developing sense of the ecological body , which I suggest differs from the environmental body in part because it perceives the world from motion rather than stasis. The ecological body experiences its changing self as a changing system among other environmental systems.
To bring these lenses and rather abstract ideas to life, I punctuate my analysis with a hypothetical case study that is based on my movement observation over twenty-five years. This is designed to show how I actually read movement and to signpost a way through the different lenses that I describe. Each session (in italics) recounts the progress of one individual’s movement practice, as I record it in my notes. The correlation between the points made in these session notes and the text that follows it is precise. At times I make the connection explicit; otherwise I invite you to look for the connection yourself.
L ENS 1: T HE B ODY AS O BJECT
S ESSION 1
F. comes into the village hall for an individual movement session. She is a photographer, aged around 55, living locally, who sees nature as one of the primary inspirations in her work. She spends most of her time outside walking and exploring different environments. She spends a lot of time alone.
When she takes a photograph, she describes herself as ‘losing her body’ and as focusing through her eyes, to the exclusion of sounds, which she says she does not hear. She experiences herself as being separate from the environment captured in her photographs. Instead of sensing herself as part of the situation, she feels that she positions herself in overview.
She has two aims in engaging in movement practice. The first is to develop a more embodied approach to her photography. She hopes that this will influence the sense of rhythm and involved participation in her photographs. The second is to ‘keep her body flexible’, as she is worried about getting stiffer in the joints, and the fact that she has pain developing in her right shoulder.
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I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing; so that this ‘I’, that is to say, the mind, by which I am what I am is entirely distinct from the body, and even that it is easier to know than the body, and moreover, that even if the body were not, it would not cease to be all that is.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 54
These words of René Descartes, written in 1637, set in motion the whole idea of the ‘body as object’, which is also referred to as the mechanistic body. In Cartesian thought, the body was seen as an inert object, facilitating the needs and desires of the mind, which could exist independently.
Philosophically, this position has now been largely abandoned. However, it still informs the major part of Western daily-life practice and is promoted not least by orthodox (allopathic) medicine, which remains a primary influence on our daily-life attitudes to our own bodies. For example, in the face of the ageing process, we are often encouraged to strive to remain young and to overcome our changing physical capacities, rather than acknowledging change and allowing ourselves to be stimulated into new possibilities, compatible with the capabilities of our individual bodies now.
Heward Wilkinson, in his introduction to a series of essays on the embodied mind in psychotherapy, points to all kinds of commodification of the body. He discusses, for example, the perfect body – which is to be achieved through diet and certain kinds of exercise – and he talks about how the body is replacing dreams as the seat of the unconscious in psychotherapy. Both these examples reveal an approach that does give some value to the body as a resource. However, it is also an approach that tends to view the body as an object that we do something to, or as a container that provides us with information for our conscious life, rather than as an intrinsic part of our being and of our sense of self.
The Cartesian approach, in its assumption of a disembodied mind, has been associated with a particular view of knowledge that is closely linked to mind and to the sense of sight. The mind seems connected to sight, gazing down at an unintelligent object called body that operates through the other classical senses of smell, touch, taste and hearing, as well as the kinaesthetic sense. Smell, taste, hearing and touch